Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Sixteen Very Natural, Very Dumb

The snow was falling faster at Sheepshead Bay, and it was deeper. The wind sliced in off the Channel like a ripsaw. False dawn was just beginning to gray the east. It was bitter cold.

The rows of canvas-shrouded hulls on the ways were piled yard-high with sugar-frosting. A few wore no winter covers, but it was hard to distinguish them from the others. Only a few had a sheathing of thin boards; of these but two were reasonably free of the caked covering.

One bore the name Judy C. in heavy letters across her transom. The marshal passed her up; Conover might not be the kind of waterman who insisted on naming his craft after his girl, but he’d hardly own a boat bearing the name of another.

Smoke plumed up from the Charley Noble of the second choice, anyway. Now that he plowed nearer along the hard-packed path through the shipyard, Pedley saw that the portholes of the Voyageur emitted faint light. There was someone aboard.

The someone was singing. Pedley didn’t recognize the tune or the language — probably something the lieutenant had picked up over in the Islands. There was no mistaking the voice.

Against the starboard side of the 38-footer stood a short, homemade ladder. Pedley went up it quietly, pushed aside the canvas windbreak which served as vestibule door, stepped softly onto the deck.

The deckhouse was empty and dark. What illumination there was came from the forward companionway. Pedley made no noise opening the deckhouse door — or closing it. The draft an open door could make in weather like this would be fairly noticeable.

The smell of bacon came up the companionway, along with the liquid melody of the South Seas.

Pedley went below.

Conover didn’t hear him. He stood with his back to the companionway, forking strips of golden brown onto a plate.

“Morning, Lieutenant.”

The younger man dropped fork and frying pan, whirled on the balls of his feet, ducked into a semicrouch, reached for the back of his neck, recognized the marshal, froze.

“Used to a collar sheath?” Pedley came down to the galley, leaned against the door to the motor compartment. “Got a knife cached back there? Or was that just habit? Takes a while to forget a routine that’s been hammered into you. Took me five years to forget I didn’t have to jump down a brass pole every time I heard a gong ring somewhere.”

Conover straightened up, brought his hand away from the neckband of his sweater.

“And I was expecting you to drop in on me, too.” He grinned, dourly. “I didn’t hear a thing. You must have had one of those commando courses.”

“You were making too much noise yourself.” Pedley looked around. A good serviceable cruiser; nothing fancy but nothing lacking. White paint instead of varnish work; an iron shipmate in place of the usual compressed gas cookstove.

But the dish rack was grimy; there were no signs of food anywhere except what the lieutenant had on the stove. No coffee. No butter. A new loaf of bread with only two slices gone.

It didn’t look as though the Voyageur had been lived on much, now he came to analyze it. No ash trays around. No clothes hanging up.

“Do your own cooking here, most of the time, Conover?”

The lieutenant drained a piece of bacon, dropped it onto the plate. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m interested in cooking. It’s my line, you might say. For instance, you’ve got too much draft through your stove. Guess you haven’t had time to adjust it. Takes a few days.”

“What if I haven’t been holing up here right along?”

“You said you were living out here. I didn’t think you were.”

“What did you think?”

“That you were — staying in town.”

Conover shoved the frying pan to the side lids. “I suppose you know where, too!”

“The Riveredge, for first choice.”

The lieutenant’s left shoulder dropped, his left arm went back pugnaciously. Then he laughed. “I ought to toss you out on your can, for that.”

“I don’t toss easy, Lieutenant. I don’t say you couldn’t do it. But you’d be apt to get banged up. And for what? To protect the fair lady’s name? You aren’t so wet behind the ears you think you’re the first male who’s had breakfast with the dame!”

“All right now! That’s it!” Conover stepped forward with his left foot, bent his head a little; the movement had the effect of sinking his chin behind his left shoulder.

Pedley didn’t alter his own position, though he recognized the professional slugger’s stance.

“You shouldn’t expect to stake out a Keep-Off-the-Grass notice on a seductive sal like Leila.”

“I’m going to beat the living bejeesis out of you. No one can talk that way about my wife!”

Pedley lifted his hand in the traffic cop’s gesture. “What’s this about the bonds of holy matrimony?”

“Goddamn your soul!” The lieutenant trembled. “I gave her my word of honor I wouldn’t tell anyone — and here you chivvy it out of me. Well, it’s a fact. We’re married. Been married, over a month.”

“I’d never doubt the word of an officer and a gentleman. But why’s Leila want to keep it under cover?”

“She doesn’t, any longer.”

“Um. Brother Ned was the flea in the ointment?”

“Who else?”

“Put it in words of one syllable.”

“Ned claimed it would hurt her at this stage of her development. He wanted to get her next option taken up or a new contract signed or whatever.”

“No savvy. Wedding chimes don’t hurt the flicker stars. Some of ’em have been married and de-married three or four times. Sometimes I think they do it just to hit the front pages.”

Conover scowled darkly. “Suggesting I wed up with Leila because she’s a celebrity?”

“Cool down. All I meant was, it doesn’t seem a very solid reason for holding your honeymoon in a dimout. Must have been something else.”

The lieutenant returned to his bacon. “There was. Ned had the Indian sign on Li.”

“He was holding something over her head.”

“That,” Conover said dryly, “is the logical supposition.”

“Something more than photos of the female form divine.”

“I don’t know what it was.”

Pedley watched him pour a batter of eggs into the frying pan. “Must have been important enough to ready Lownes for a shroud. To charcoal-grill Kim Wasson within an inch of her life.”

The fork clattered on the stove lids. The frying pan slid against the guard rail. Conover didn’t turn around, just stood stock-still, his back to the marshal.

“Kim? When?”

“Few hours ago. In addition to sending La Wasson to the emergency ward, the blaze put a good ladderman in the hospital and cost the City of New York fifty thousand bucks or so to put the fire out. To say nothing of another fifty the insurance companies will have to pay on the building. Adds up, you see.”

“How do you know it was set by the same person who started the other fire?”

Pedley held up a finger. “Your arranger pal was scared out of her scanties that someone would get to her.” He put up a second finger. “The fire was set in her three-room-and-bath down in the Village.” A third digit straightened. “Method was about the same in both cases. Made to look like an accident. Rigged up to give the firebug a chance to be long gone from those parts before the alarm went in.”

The lieutenant turned around. His face was drawn and tense; there was the same wild light in his eyes Pedley had seen during the piano-pounding scene at Leila’s.

“If you knew this, why’d you mush out here to check up on me?”

“I know more than that. Among other things, that Miss Lownes, pardon, Mrs. Conover left the Riveredge about three-quarters of an hour before the fire started in Kim Wasson’s kitchenette; didn’t return until twenty minutes after the alarm went in.”

The eggs began to smoke; Conover ignored them, clenched his left fist and began to pound the motor-room bulkhead gently.

“She went down to Sheridan Square. Case you’re not familiar with the Village, that’s not too far from where Kim Wasson lived.” Pedley reached over, took the pan off the stove. “That isn’t all we’ve got. But it’ll do for a starter.”

“What would you say—” Conover kept on with the tattoo against the bulkhead but his tone was almost placid — “if I told you Leila came downtown to meet me; to get me to go back to her apartment for the night?”

“I’d say you were lying like a trooper to give your wife an out. Very natural thing to do. Very dumb.”

“Suppose I admitted I’d been up in Li’s dressing-room when she and Chuck brought Ned up there, yesterday afternoon.”

“Simple way to dispose of that. We’ll drop in and ask her to sign an affidavit to that effect.”

Conover shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Hell of a lot of difference it’ll make. Douse the stove. No telling when you’ll be back.”

Indecision was stamped on Conover’s face. Should he risk a rough-and-tumble? In close quarters here, he might be able to put the marshal away.

Pedley cast the deciding six votes. “I know. You’ve been trained to take a guy with a gun, Lieutenant. But don’t try judo on me. I’ll wing you so you won’t be much of a husband for a while.”

They went up the companionway and down the ladder, slogged through the shipyard. Conover appeared to have given up the idea of a break.

At the sedan, the marshal opened the door on the driver’s side.

“Get in the saddle.”

“You want me at the wheel?”

“Otherwise I’d have to cuff you. Better this way.” He went around the sedan, got in the other side. “And don’t get the notion your hand is quicker than my eye.”

Conover was a good driver. He made speed back toward the Bridge. A little too much on the icy curves.

Pedley cautioned him, “You don’t have to bear down on that gas every second!”

With an angry jut of his jaw, Conover jammed on the brakes.

The car slurred, skidded in a slow semicircle at fifty.

It hit the ditch sideways, did a lopsided somersault, and crashed into a telegraph pole with a bang that could have been heard all the way to Harlem.